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Friday, July 9, 2010

Week 3: How delicious is this week?

Sometimes I feel myself as my students. I need some activities full of fun and enjoyment. The last week was a little bit tough, but this week began with a delicious task. At the beginning of this week, one of my colleagues asked me about how to use “delicious”. To be honest, this is not the first time to hear about it. I know it is one of the web 2.0 tools, but I don’t think about making use of it. Surfing the internet, I found that http://delicious.com/ is a social bookmarking site where you can save all of your bookmarks or favorites in one place. This permits you to access the same bookmarks on any computer at any location.

What else can delicious enable you?

It enables you to bookmark links you want to return to.

It enables you to share links with people who have common interests. By sharing links through del.icio.us rather than by sending links in an email, users are providing access to current and future links they may add to their del.icio.us accounts. Users can mark links as private so that visitors to their del.icio.us site will not see them. del.icio.us also allows users to share content directly through certain tags.

Tags are one word descriptions assigned to bookmarks by the user. They are not hierarchical. The use of tags rather than folders in organizing the content has several
implications for del.icio.us users. First, users can invent their own tags. This allows users not only to tag resources based on content, but also based on what they want to do with content. For example, you might tag a resources as to_read if you want to read it later. Tags also make your bookmarks at del.icio.us searchable. Users can assign as many tags to a bookmark as they want.

Some colleagues pointed out that one of the disadvantage of delicious is not having folders. However, I think we can consider tags as our online folders, If we create a little bit broad tags. I like the idea of adapting everything we have and not to restrict to a certain format.

Another benefit of del.icio.us is the ability to view information from other del.icio.us users. When a user bookmarks a site on del.icio.us, they can see how many other people have saved that content. They are also able to see the usernames of those who have tagged the content, allowing them to find people with similar interests. In addition, users can search del.icio.us using tags to find other peer recommended links.

Is it difficult to use it?

As one of the web 2.0 tools, it is very easy to use. You don’t need even instructions to do this. You need just to explore it: http://delicious.com/azharyoussef. As you know I don’t depend on my experience or exploration of new task only, but also I do search for more information about it. In addition to my dear instructor Deborah, I’ve read a lot of articles and watched some videos of how to use delicious effectively. Here is one of the videos that opened many windows on this delicious world:

Viewing this video, you will find it is very easy to create your account:

After you have registered for your account, you will be taken to a page allowing you to install the del.icio.us buttons on your browser. These buttons will allow you to navigate and save bookmarks to your del.icio.us page in a an easy way.

If you wish to install these buttons, select “Install Buttons Now”.

Save the delicious.msi installer to your desktop.

After the installer has completely downloaded, close all open Internet Explorer windows.

Double-click to run the delicious.msi installer and select Run.

Once the installation is done, a new browser window will automatically open to your del.icio.us account.

As soon as you create your account, you will feel how delicious the delicious website is. You can make many things: you can add a new bookmark and send it to your friends at the same time, add a new user to your network and benefit from his/her bookmarks, create tags to collect similar sites, read and save other people’s websites, …. etc. Although it is a magic tool, I think it is not of great value for my pre-intermediate students. They can benefit from it indirectly. I mean through me as a teacher. I can share and save valuable sites, then visit them to print and download suitable files for my students. This tool is suitable for advanced students as they need to know other people of the same interests and make friends around the world.

As you see this tool is very valuable for teachers. I’m not going to repeat my self, but everyone of us should have a delicious account not just to save our favorites but also to check others’ favorites and choose people of the same interest. This will extend our friends base and gain more experiences. I recognize all these benefits when I use it this week. My colleagues’ delicious pages are full of treasures that it is very difficult to get them alone. Thanks so much my dear colleagues for your valuable websites and thanks my dear instructor Deborah for this task that helps me to discover two worlds one inside me and the other around me.